Right... so my opinion on the Crytek guys and their lovely engine, which is a very nice engine. I think that the Cry engine is exemplary in doing reasonably well what a lot of other people had done before them. Everything in the Cry engine had been done in video games before - just not as well or with everything else that was in the Cry engine [to my knowledge]. The only thing I can possibly think of that might have been new was the long draw distance detail scaling, but that's basically common sense LOD anyhow, so I don't see anything terribly new [in concept] there. It is an excellent engine though - in particular it's very versatile. It deals remarkably well both in and outdoors, and all of its features are very well integrated.

With all that said, I don't think they're as good as Carmack, but at the same time we haven't had a lot of comparison in terms of 'apples to apples'. I really do think that even on today's hardware, Doom 3 is a mighty achievement in terms of an engine that is both fantastically powerful, and scales really well. The Cry Engine loses so much going down to lower detail settings. Not that Doom 3 looks all that good on dated hardware, but it doesn't look all that bad either. Also, technically, unified lighting - which is the really amazing thing about the D3 engine, apparently works almost all the way down. I gather you can't run it on a 5200, or possibly an MX 440, but beyond that everything else can do the really hard stuff with the Doom 3 engine, without sacrificing absolutely everything else. Hell, even on low detail, D3 still looks mighty good.

My statement about apples to apples is basically this. We simply haven't seen how well the Doom 3 engine copes with large outdoor spaces - in the same way we hadn't with the Q3 engine until other games that used it came out. It may be that once viscious LOD scaling comes into the picture, the D3 engine will show some cracks. Also, we've not seen how the Doom 3 engine copes with many lower poly characters on screen rather than, say, 5 or 6 very detailed ones. All of these things will end up defining how good Carmack's bid with this gen of engines really is. As I say, the Far Cry engine is versatile, but it doesn't even come close to the D3 engine in what we've seen the D3 engine do.

So, even with Far Cry included, my vote stays with Mr C. His work in bringing practical, robust, and remarkably fast shadow volumes to the public (which are harder than you might think - a lot of things can go wrong - I know, I've coded them before), is just amazing. Doom 3 is a real step up in pretty much everything it does. Not only that, it does it on old hardware if it needs to. The only problem is, we haven't seen it do anything else. Yet. I suspect it's really going to get to show its power in the next year or so with D3 based games.

In the end my current praise for Carmack comes down to this:
At every generation of game that he's had an engine in, he's completely raised the bar on hardware no-one knew could do it.
Commander Keen was amazing when it came out.
Doom was ridiculous for what it did.
Quake was revolutionary.
Quake 2's introduction of coloured lighting added a LOT. And it was FAST on old machines.
Quake 3 STILL LOOKS GOOD.
Doom 3 as an engine is ahead of anything else currently available.

Still, the addition of HDR to Far Cry could change things a little. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

[Note: The Source Engine is cool, but I maintain that it isn't as cool as the Doom 3 one. That is all on that note.]

Excellent post!

Except, the addtion of HDR to FarCry, would NOT put it ahead of Doom3's engine.

All you need to do for Doom3 to have HDR is;

1.) Change the framebuffer to 16bit (Really easy)

2.)Add a final rendering pass that translates the FP16 framebuffer to the standard 8-bit framebuffer (pretty easy).

Now, for it to look good, the actual content would have to be different. But if I licenced the doom3 engine today, and wanted HDR to be implimented, it would be trivial for a programmer with the source code to do it

If someone put the Doom3 engine to really good use (both large outdoor environments and detailed, beautiful indoors, highres textures, highpoly models ect.), combined it with an immersive and well-written storyline and, licenced a quality physicssystem (Like Havok or Meqon) it would get REALLY interessting. The only thing that Doom3 lacked was a decent physicssystem, though it was not bad in comparison to other games. Even though Source some very advanced physics, I definently see more potential in the Doom3 engine, if used correctly.
That aside, I REALLY look foward to HL2, and although the engine won't be as revolutinary as it would have been a year ago, it was still produce fantastic graphic scenes, I'm sure

whats different about hl2's physic and doom 3s? turn on g_dragentity and you got a physic gun, then spawn env_ragdoll_ object and throw them around. doom 3s ragdoll is very very smooth. can spawn some lighted objects and carry it around with it.

Hm yeah I agree. I don't really see a lot lacking in the Doom3 physics engine. Things get blown around convincingly from explosions, things swing nicely, etc etc. Of course, they didn't make physics objects out of every object, and they optimised some things, like reducing the length of time that a light swings for (it just resets after it gets close to where it started, I think).

Maybe some other physics engines are more complete, but the one in Doom3 didn't feel at all lacking, to me.

In terms of physics I'd really like to see an implementation in a game of the BD-Trees paper from SIGGRAPH this year. It allows for soft body collisions and deformation in only 2n time, where n is the amount of time it would take with traditional rigid body collisions...

As good as the Unreal Engine is. In terms of programming talent, i'd go with Carmack. There may have been other people that would have done for FPS the way carmack did, but the point is, he did it before anyone else. Ergo, he was ahead of everyone else. And unless he's been just twiddling his thumbs for the past 5 years, i doub't any single person would have caught up to him in terms of experience.

Actually, FarCry's was the second game i've seen that let's you headshot a mile away. The original one was MDK. MDK may be old but i have yet to find a game with a better sniping system =) Plus i can't even call MDK hitbox based since those 'hitboxes' are more like per polygon collision (hitboxes are scaled down versions of the actual models used), take a shot between the arm and chest and it's a guaranteed miss I'd say MDK was well ahead of it's time.